#75: How will you make decisions in 2030? (Hint: Brace for impact!)🔮
Hello,
This newsletter will take you about 4 minutes to read.
I. Spotlight: How will you make decisions in 2030?🔮
Let’s say you are the business manager of a retail chain. You’re facing the problem of customer churn.
How would you arrive at decisions to retain your customers?
Today, there are three common steps to get you from business problems to decisions:
Gather the data: Collect information about the problem and understand its impact. There’s no paucity of data sources, types, or ingestion tools. Enterprise data, public data, (unethical) private data - we have it all!
Perhaps, you know a lot more about those retail customers than their own family.
Analyze for insights: Find out what causes the problem and how it can be solved tomorrow. Predictive techniques and AI-driven simulations can model hundreds of scenarios to tell what could happen in each.
You can roll out personalized discounts to a hyper-targeted set of customers.
Story-tell recommendations: Rationalize the best option and build consensus among leaders. Visual storytelling of insights can not just convince people but move them to action.
Your story weaves in ROI from retained customers to secure your marketing budget.
(Photo: How we make decisions today)
Thanks to advances in data science, decision-making does seem easy today. Now, are you wondering if it could get any better in the future?
Yes! Let’s get into a time machine.
(Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash)
Decision making in the 2030s
Decision-makers in the future might look back at today as the middle ages of decision making - progressing, yet primitive.
Why?
Here’s how I think our three steps could evolve in the next 10 years:
Gather the data - Neural interface: You won’t need any device to gather or access your data. Thanks to neural interfaces, your brain can be plugged into the network. At will.
Data harvested from human memories will enrich signals (yes, ethics & privacy will be a bigger nightmare). All data will be hidden, like a low-level layer. Remember, your customers are part of this neural collective! You will get deeper, ready-made answers to why your customers churned.
Analyze for insights - Collective intelligence: Computing would have reached exceptional heights, at quantum scale. However, the big game-changer would be the addition of human brainpower into the computing mix.
The neural hive’s collective intelligence will make it possible to come up with the deepest insights at scale, thanks to device implants. Human intelligence will make it easier to blend insights into the business. The recommendations to control churn will be non-intuitive, actionable.. and yes, still not very explainable!
Storytell recommendations - Encoded impulses: Visual stories work best when we scan using our eyes and transfer to the brain. When you tell stories inside the human brain, will they still be visual? Why not encode them as say, neural impulses?
Information design will evolve to adapt to the brain-computer interface. When you have a connected hive of human minds (remember Avatar, the movie?), your recommendations to prevent churn will be effortless to understand. You think up decisions and the group nods in agreement!
(Photo: How we might make decisions in 2030)
What’s the biggest change in all of this? The complete cycle from problems-to-decisions may no longer play out in the physical world.
All of this could shift (back) inside our brain - thanks to neural interfaces, collective intelligence, and encoded impulses. How will this impact you?
II. Industry Roundup:
1. Article: Why Your Company Needs Data-Product Managers
06 minutes | HBR | Thomas H. Davenport, Randy Bean, and Shail Jain
Companies often fail to deploy data scientist-created models, with only 20% reaching production. To combat this, firms are adopting data products to solve business issues. This transition challenges legacy companies, leading to the creation of the data product manager role. This role is essential for coordinating development, understanding technical and business aspects, and leading diverse teams to successful deployment.
->Â Read the Article
2. Article: Agent Swarms – an evolutionary leap in intelligent automation
10 minutes | CIO | Shail Khiyara
Agent Swarms, inspired by nature, are set to revolutionize automation with their decentralized intelligence. Imagine the collective behaviors of natural entities like bees or ants. We’ll soon have multiple autonomous software agents, each independently assessing and reacting to its environment while contributing to shared goals. They promise adaptive, fault-tolerant solutions for complex challenges across sectors like healthcare and finance.
->Â Read the Article
III. From my Desk:Â
1. Talk: Guest Lecture at Columbia University
Excited to share my recent guest lectures at Columbia University with the MSBA Business Analytics students! We delved into transforming supply chains through predictive analytics and the critical reasons behind the failure of data science projects. Engaging over 200 students, their insightful queries and enthusiasm were invigorating. This experience underscored the joy and inspiration found in the vibrant exchange of knowledge. Their energy was truly infectious.
->Â See LinkedIn post for more details
Thank you for subscribing and reading the newsletter. I appreciate your attention,
Ganes.
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I’m Ganes Kesari. I publish ‘Data-Driven Future’ to help understand how data shapes our world, explore key trends, and explain what they mean for you today. I speak and write to demystify data science for decision-makers and organizations.
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